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Category Archives: video

As a part of my job I frequently meet with amazing startups as well as established, and highly successful businesses. What continues to amaze me is that leveraging the 1B YouTube users as a part of their strategy often comes as an afterthought. In fact, sometimes even folks who target YouTube users with their product fail to establish presence on the very platform they’re trying to address.

While text and photos are cool, video is the most powerful medium out there. If you have been hiding under a rock, now would be a good time to shake off the 90s and take advantage of what 21st century has to offer. In fact, a great way to start is by watching this Google I/O 2013 presentation by AJ Crane and Lane Shackleton from YouTube, and Scott Imbrie from Original Skateboards.

There are a few key things you will learn:

The difference between content and commercials

How to brand your YouTube presence in the new multi-device world we’re living in

How to use AdWords for Video to promote your content

How InVideo programming helps with cross-promotion

How to grow and nurture your YouTube community

You will also witness a makeover of a popular (500k subs, >100M views) YouTube channel performed in front of a live audience and more.

Last but not least, you will discover what the title of this post is all about 🙂

If you are coming to Google I/O 2013 you can spend the entire show learning about nothing else but video. YouTube has and entire track this year, and all three days of I/O are full of video goodness. Day 1 (Wed) and Day 2 (Th) are jam-packed with YouTube sessions. Day 3 (Fri) features two YouTube API codelabs.

This year we have two categories of sessions:

YouTube API-specific sessions

General knowledge-sharing sessions for anyone who loves video

While the former is something expected at I/O, I am particularly proud of the latter since it is great to give back. Here’s the list of sessions that belong to the “general knowledge sharing” category:

In the YouTube API Sandbox we will feature seven companies showing innovative apps for all three days of I/O. All of them will have fun demos but if you are short on time don’t miss the following three:

You may have noticed that sites with lots of video embeds on the same page may suffer from performance issues due to player load overhead. My colleagues Greg Schechter and Phil Harnish suggested not loading the player at all to handle this use case, you can find more info in the GDD talk entitled HTML5, Flash and the Battle for Faster YouTube Cat Videos.

After Pamela Fox asked me about this issue today I decided to prototype a simple example of how a workaround might work. You’ll find the code here. It loads thumbnails and replaces them with the YouTube iframe player upon click. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

My YouTube colleague Mykola Dzuba put together a nice example of building your own YouTube Flash player using our AS3 chromeless player API called youtube-as3-player-helper. One of the interesting features available to Flash player developers is full screen playback. Here is an example of how it works.

Overall the Oct 1st event went quite well, though I think it would be nice to get more ‘designer/videograhper types’ next time as the crowd was very developer-heavy. We have a long way to go to make these types of events for video mainstream rather than niche it is today.

YouBomber – voice and graphical video annotations editor by Tom Saffell (co-founder, sellstage.com) . Main prize winner overall and winner of the YouTube API prize. The user can play a YouTube video, draw and talk-over it, stop and resume playback. Upon replay, all of that (including voiceover) is nicely replayed. The overall experience almost matches a CSI show, where the ‘bad guy’ is typically identified by the investigator viewing a close circuit television footage 🙂 Very cool hack, though totally non compliant with YouTube’s ToS (since we don’t allow painting over the player area :-/).

Ragatzi – by Semira Rahemtulla (CEO and Co-founder) and team Ragatzi. YouTube API prize winner. Using YouTube API, TokBox (video chat), RoR back-end, JavaScript front-end. Designed to keep distributed families closer, it handles the ‘bedtime story’ use case where a remote family member is reading a book or watching together a video with a child.

Music Explorer – by Carl Rosenberg and Alex Kalinin from coincident.tv, YouTube API prize winner. Uses Rovi API and YouTube API to help one discover and listen to new music. Allows for browsing of related artists to find similar performers of the same genre.